Tag Archives: design

Approximately one hour of video is uploaded onto YouTube every second.

That’s about 3 hours more just while you read that first sentence.

From an industry perspective, more video is uploaded to YouTube in one month than the 3 major US networks created in 60 years.

Video is entertaining – an element that makes it highly viral.

It can be used to promote products, to divulge highbrow TED Talks or to deliver easily understood “how to do that” tutorials. Video and animation can cheaply and efficiently purvey a huge quantity of information in just a minute or two.

Nonetheless, our minds are not video-oriented. We are easily distracted.

The blink test asserts that if we do not identify what we are looking for in 3 seconds, chances are we’ll abandon our pursuit.

The Internet of Things is rapidly gaining ground as an ever-greater number of objects around us – ranging from refrigerators to medical devices – are becoming capable of exchanging data not only amongst themselves, but also with other intelligent devices.

Technoliquidity, a new book published by two Italian psychology experts, postulates that entertainment technology, such as video games, has triggered an evolutionary leap, just like the written word did 3,000 years ago.

”It has changed our memory, our brain has lost certain connections. Some circuits have been lost and others have developed, circuits that are more closely linked to perception.”

Indeed, in today’s world of complex systems, big data and massive analytical capability, we should remember to step back and remember that innovation can – and often does – arise from simple human ingenuity.

There is no such thing as a perfect virus or we wouldn’t be here to talk about it.

All networks – including human and server-based ones – operate according to a nearly universal series of fundamental properties. In fact, viral messages propagate throughout the media multiverse in much the same way as the Black Plague clawed its way through Medieval Europe.

Leaving aside our biological counterpart, however, a viral message is based on a remarkable idea. This is an idea that is worth remarking on, that is worth sharing.

In fact, as Seth Godin has pointed out, even a simple unorthodoxy will naturally attract interest as long as it is remarkable:

Cows are a perfectly normal occurrence on the side of the road, you’d never stop to see one, but a purple cow isn’t the norm; in fact, it would be quite astonishing. You might pull over to have a look.

Neurobiological monitoring has shown that the brain is most aroused by patterns in which there is about 20 percent redundancy of elements or, put roughly, the amount of complexity found in a simple maze, or two turns of a logarithmic spiral, or an asymmetric cross.

It may be a coincidence (although I think not) that about the same degree of complexity is shared by a great deal of art in friezes, grillwork, colophons, logographs and flag designs. It crops up again in the glyphs of the ancient Middle East and Mesoamerica, as well as in the pictographs and letters of modern Asian languages. The same level of complexity characterizes part of what is considered attractive in primitive art and modern abstract art and design.

The source of the principle may be that this amount of complexity is the most that the brain can process in a single glance. When a picture is more complex, the eye grasps its contents by saccades or consciously reflective travel from one section to the next.

A quality of great art is its ability to guide attention from one of its parts to another in a manner that pleases, informs and provokes.

The intrinsic beauty of Punjabi text, like that of many languages, is enhanced by the closeness of the symbols to the level of maximum automatic arousal.